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It is likely – – or if it isn’t, it should be – – a universal truth that everyone loves clean clothes but no one likes doing the laundry. I have arrived at this conclusion through many years of my own thoroughly unscientific observations in the laundry room in my apartment building. (My other research project is focused upon discovering the origin of the rift in the time and space continuum where stray socks always seem to disappear into in the washers and dryers.)

This ages old situation might be about to change based upon an interesting new development. This story is neither made from whole cloth nor a fabric-ation.

A group of scientists in Australia claim to have discovered a means to keep clothes clean by treating them with nano-size particles of two common metals and then exposing the fabric to sunlight. This could perhaps one day mean an end to washing clothes in the traditional soap and water manner. This research was reported in an article in the April 25, 2016 edition of The Wall Street Journal entitled An End to Laundry? The Promise of Self-Cleaning Fabric, by Rachel Pannett. I will summarize and annotate this story, and then pose several of my own questions about this, well, material.

Dry Cleaning

Rajesh Ramanathan, a postdoctoral fellow at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, explained the basic principal being tested: Minute flecks of copper and silver (called nanostructures), are embedded into cotton fabrics that, when exposed to sunlight, generate small amounts of energy “that degrade organic matter ” on the cloth in about six minutes. He and his team are conducting their work at the Ian Potter NanoBioSensing Facility, within RMIT.

Dr. Ramanathan characterized the team’s work as being in its early stages and involving “nano-enhanced fabrics” with the “ability to clean themselves”. The silver and copper do not alter the fabric in any way and remain embedded even when rinsed in water. As a result, their self-cleaning abilities will persist in successive multiple cleanings.

While encouraging no one to get rid of their washing machines just yet, he does believe that his team’s work “lays a strong foundation” for additional advancements in creating “fully self-cleaning textiles”.

To date, the research team has been testing their fabrics with organic dyes and artificial light. Next they are planning experiments with “real world stains” such as ketsup and wine in an effort to measure how long it will take them to “degrade in natural sunlight”. Additional planed testing will be to see how the nanostructures affect odors in the fabrics.

Spin Cycle

However, another scientist named Christopher Sumby, an associate professor in chemistry and physics at the University of Adelaide, expressed his reluctance at talking about self-cleaning fabrics “at this stage”.

Nonetheless, this experimental new process that use silver and copper, are two “commonly used” chemical catalysts and are “relatively cheap”. Two of the challenges currently facing the research team are how to scale up production of these nanostructures and “how to permanently attach them to textiles”. They are using cotton in their work because it has “a natural three-dimensional structure” that enables the nanostructures to embed themselves and absorb light. They have also found that this works well in removing organic stains from polyester and nylon.

Dr. Ramanathan said that a variety of industries, including textile manufacturers, have expressed their interest to his team. He believes that to enable them to commercialize their process, they would need to make sure the nanostructures can “comply with industry standards for clothing and textiles”.

My Questions

What would be the measurable benefits to the environment and energy savings if the needs for electric washers and dryers was significantly reduced by self-cleaning fabrics? Should the researchers use this prospect to their advantage in seeking regulatory approval and additional financing?

Although using sunlight, which is free and abundant across the entire world, would be the most renewable and environmentally sound source of energy for this, could the process also be extended for use with artificial light (as is currently being used in the team), for instances where sufficient sunlight becomes unavailable due to weather conditions or other environmental factors?

Could this process also be adapted to other forms of porous materials such as wood, paper, and plastics? For example, if people go outside for a picnic, could they could theoretically clean up the table, food containers and paper plates just by leaving them in the sun and then reusing them later? This might further cut down on the volumes of these materials being thrown in the trash or else being sent for recycling.

What other entrepreneurial opportunities might arise if this process becomes commercialized?

Schattner first devised this product entirely on his own after someone who had just had some teeth pulled asked him for an antiseptic to relieve the pain. He later sold the formula and the rights to a pharmaceutical company for $4M. (Given the rate of inflation since then, this sum today would have been magnitudes more and certainly nothing to sneeze or cough at.)

Thereafter he left the practice of dentistry and went on became a successful businessman and philanthropist. He also contributed for the construction of a new building for the U Penn dental school named the Robert Schattner Center. A brief summary of his invention and contributions can be found in an article entitled Capital Buzz: Chloraseptic Inventor Offers Remedy for School, by Thomas Heath, which appeared in The Washington Post on October 23, 2011.

Mapping the Inventive Process

This is a classic example of how inventors find their ideas and inspiration. There are many other circumstances, methodologies, environments, personality traits, events, technologies and chances occurrences that can also precipitate new inventions. All of them are expertly explained and explored in Inventology: How We Dream Up Things That Change the World (Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016), by Pagan Kennedy.

The book’s five sections distinctly map out the steps in the inception and realization of things so entirely new. In doing so, the author transports the reader to center of this creative process. She deftly uses highly engaging stories, exposition and analyses to illuminate the resourcefulness and persistence of inventors leading to their breakthroughs.

Some of these tales may be familiar but they are skillfully recounted and placed into new contexts. For example, in 1968, an engineer and inventor named Douglas Englebart demonstrated a working computer for the first time with a heretofore unseen “mouse” and “graphical user interface”. (This story has gone on to become a tech legend known as The Mother of All Demos.) Others are presented who are less well-known but brought to life in highly compelling narratives. Together they provide valuable new lessons on the incubation of inventions along a wide spectrum ranging from sippy cups and water toys to mobile phones and medical devices.

The author has seemingly devised a meta-invention of her own: A refreshingly new perspective on reporting the who, what, where and why of inventors, their creations and their wills to succeed. It is a richly detailed schematic of how a creative mind can conceive and execute an original idea for a new widget and, moreover, articulate the need for it and the problem it solves.

Among other methods, Ms. Pagan covers the practice of conducting thought experiments on new concepts that may or may not lend themselves to actual experimentation in the real world. This process was made well-known by Einstein’s efforts to visualize certain problems in physics that led him to his monumental achievements. I suggest trying a thought experiment here to imagine the range of the potential areas of applications for Inventology to evaluate, in an age of countless startups and rapid scientific and technological advancements, all of the populations, challenges and companies it might benefit. Indeed, this book could readily inspire nearly anyone so inclined to pick up a pencil or soldering iron in order to launch the realization of their own proverbial better mousetrap.

Resources for Inventors

Within all of the lively content packed into this book, the struggles and legacy of a previously little known and tragically persecuted figure who learned to harness and teach the inventive process, springs right off the pages. He was a fascinating figure named Genrich Altshuller who worked as an engineer, writer and inventor in Russia. His most important contribution to the science of invention was the development of the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving (better known by its Russian acronym of “TRIZ”). This is a comprehensive system for analyzing and implementing inventive solutions to problems of nearly every imaginable type and scale. Altschuller was willing to share this and instruct anyone who was willing to participate in studying TRIZ. It is still widely used across the modern world. The author masterfully breaks down and clearly explains its essential components.

The true gem in the entire book is how Altshuller, while imprisoned in a brutal jail in Stalinist Russia, used only his mind to devise an ingenious solution to outwit his relentless interrogators. No spoilers here, but it is an emotional triumph that captures the heart and spirit of this remarkable man. Altshuller’s life and influence in generating thousands of inventions reads as though it might make for a dramatic biopic.

Also threaded and detailed throughout the book are the current bounty of easily accessible technological tools available to inventors. First, the web holds a virtual quantum of nearly limitless data that can be researched, processed, shared, crowdsourced (on sites such as InnoCentive) and crowdfunded (on sites such as Kickstarter and Indigogo), in search of medical advances, among many other fields.¹ Second, 3D printing² can be used to quickly and inexpensively fabricate and work on enhancing prototypes of inventions. As a result of this surfeit of resources, the lengthy timelines and prohibitive cost curves that previously discouraged and delayed inventors have now been significantly reduced.

Impossibility is Only Temporary

I live in a neighborhood where it is nearly impossible to park a car. An open parking space has a half-life on the street of about .000001 nano-seconds before it is taken. This situation often reminds me of a suggestion my father also made to me when I was very young. He told me that if I really wanted to solve an important problem when I grew up, I should try to invent a car that, at the press of a button, would fold up into the size and shape of a briefcase that could be easily carried away. At the time, I thought it was impossible and immediately put the, well, brakes on this idea.

Nonetheless, as Inventology expressly and persuasively makes its own brief case, true inventors see impossibility as merely a temporary condition that, with enough imagination and determination, can be overcome. For budding Edisons and creative problem solvers everywhere, this book adds a whole new meaning to the imperative that nothing is truly impossible if you try hard enough and long enough to solve it. This indefatigable spirit permeates all 223 pages of this wonderfully enjoyable, inspirational and informative book.

1. For example, last week’s Only Human podcast on NPR included a report on how a woman with Type 1 (T1) diabetes, along with the assistance of her husband, had hacked together an artificial pancreas (called a “closed loop” system), and then shared the technical specs online with other T1s in the Seattle area. I highly recommend listening to this podcast entitled The Robot Vacuum Ate My Pancreas in its entirety.

New York is an incredibly vast and complex city in a multitude of ways which, despite its extensive mass transit system, also makes it a great place to walk around. Many New Yorkers prefer to travel to their destinations by foot purely for the pleasure of it. I am proudly one among them.

Whether it is on the streets of NYC or anywhere else across the world, bipedal locomotion is a healthy, no cost and deeply sensory experience as you take in all of the sights and sounds along your route. It also gives you the opportunity to think to yourself. Whether it is pondering the particulars of “When am I going to get the laundry done?” up to and including “E=MC²”, plus a gazillion other possible thoughts and subjects in between, putting one foot in front of another and then starting off of your way will transport you to all kinds of intriguing places inside and outside of your head.

Researchers in US universities have recently found compelling evidence that walking can also be quite conducive to creativity. This was the subject of a most interesting article on Quartz.com posted on April 10, 2016, entitled Research Backs Up the Instinct That Walking Improves Creativity, by Olivia Goldhill. I highly recommend reading this in its entirety. I will summarize and add some additional context to this, and then pose some of my own pedestrian questions.

The effects seen upon the test subjects’ levels of creativity were nearly equivalent whether they were walking outside or else on a treadmill inside while facing a wall. It was the act of walking itself rather than the surroundings that was responsible.

Dr. Schwartz said that the “physiological changes” related to walking are “very complicated”. The reason why walking benefits “so many thinkers” is not readily apparent. However, he thinks “that the brain is focusing on doing a task it’s quite good at”. As a result, walking relaxes people and enables them to think freely.

While it is scientifically well-known that exercise can improve an individual’s mood, the underlying reason remains unclear whether, in its “more intense forms”, exercise has the same effect when compared to walking. (For the full details on this, the article links to a report entitled The Exercise Effect, by Kirsten Weir, which was the cover story in the December 2011 edition of the Monitor of Psychology, Vol. 42, No. 11.)

Walking the Talk

“Coming and Going”, Image by David Robert Bliwas

Barbara Oakley, is an engineering professor at Oakland University and the author of A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science (Even If You Flunked Algebra), (TarcherPerigee, 2014), about effective learning. Her text includes the beneficial effects of walking. In an interview, she took the position that it is incorrect to assume that people are only learning when they are “focused”. Rather, she believes that walking enables us to “subconsciously process and think in a different way”. This has helped her in her own work when she has become “stuck”. After she takes a walk for 15 minutes, she finds that her ideas begin to flow again.

Some therapists have also recently tried to use the benefits of walking outdoors while conducting sessions with their clients. For example, Clay Cockrell, a therapist in New York, believes that this activity permits “more free form thinking”. He sees 35 to 40 clients each week using this approach and has found them grateful for the opportunity to do so.

Mr. Cockrell believes that New Yorkers mostly travel from destination to destination and, as he says are “never just outside out and about”.

[I respectfully disagree on that last point as I stated in my opening.]

My Questions

In order to achieve the full benefits of increased creativity while walking, is it necessary not to have other distractions, specifically mobile phones open, at the same time? That is, should we put away the smartphone?

Alternatively, does listening to the music streams or podcast downloads on our phones have any effect upon our creativity while walking?

Does walking and talking with other people have a positive or negative effect upon creativity? Should walking be kept to a solo activity when specifically done to spend time thinking about something?

We all learned about the periodic table of elements in high school chemistry class. This involved becoming familiar with the names, symbols and atomic weights of all of the chemical occupants of this display. Today, the only thing I still recall from this academic experience was when the teacher told us on the first day of class that we would soon learn to laugh at the following:

Two hydrogen atoms walk into a bar and the first one says to the other “I’ve lost my electron”. The other one answers “Are you sure?”. The first one says “I’m positive.”

I still find this hilarious but whatever I recall today about learning chemistry would likely get lost at the bottom of a thimble. I know, you are probably thinking “Sew what”.

Facing the Elements

Besides everyone’s all-time favorites like oxygen and hydrogen that love to get mixed up with each other and most of the other 116 elements, another one stands alone as the foundation upon which the modern information age was born and continues to thrive today. Silicon has been used to create integrated circuits, much more commonly known as computer chips.

This has been the case since they were first fabricated in the late 1950’s. It has remained the material of choice including nearly all the chips running every imaginable one of our modern computing and communication devices. Through major advances in design, engineering and fabrication during the last five decades, chip manufacturers have been able to vastly shrink this circuitry and pack millions of components into smaller squares of this remarkable material.

A fundamental principle that has held up and guided the semiconductor industry, under relentlessly rigorous testing during silicon’s enduring run, is Moore’s Law. In its simplest terms, it states that the number of transistors that can be written onto a chip doubles nearly every two years. There have been numerous predictions for many years that the end of Moore’s Law is approaching and that another substrate, other than silicon, will be found in order to continue making chips smaller, faster and cheaper. This has not yet come to pass and may not do so for years to come.

Nonetheless, scientists and developers from a diversity of fields, industries and academia have remained in pursuit of alternative computing materials. This includes elements and compounds to improve or replace silicon’s extensible properties, and other efforts to research and fabricate entirely new computing architectures. One involves exploiting the spin states of electrons in a rapidly growing field called quantum computing (this Wikipedia link provides a detailed and accessible survey of its fundamentals and operations), and another involves using, of all things, DNA as a medium.

The field of DNA computing has actually been around in scientific labs and journals for several decades but has not gained much real traction as a viable alternative ready to produce computing chips for the modern marketplace. Recently though, a new advance was reported in a fascinating article posted on Phys.org on March 13, 2016, entitled DNA ‘origami’ Could Help Build Faster, Cheaper Computer Chips, provided by the American Chemical Society (no author is credited). I will summarize and annotate it in order to add some more context, and then pose several of my own molecular questions.

Know When to Fold ‘Em

A team of researchers reported that fabricating such chips is possible when DNA is folded and “formed into specific shapes” using a process much like origami, the Japanese art of folding paper into sculptures. They presented their findings at the 251st American Chemical Society Meeting & Exposition held in San Diego, CA during March 13 through 17, 2016. Their paper entitled 3D DNA Origami Templated Nanoscale Device Fabrication, appears listed as number 305 on Page 202 of the linked document. Their presentation on March 14, 2016, was captured on this 16-minute YouTube video, with Adam T. Woolley, Ph.D. of Brigham Young University as the presenter for the researchers.

According to Dr. Woolley, researchers want to use DNA’s “small size, base-pairing capabilities and ability to self-assemble” in order to produce “nanoscale electronics”. By comparison, silicon chips currently in production contain features 14 nanometers wide, which turn out to be 10 times “the diameter of single-stranded DNA”. Thus, DNA could be used to build chips on a much smaller and efficient scale.

However, the problem with using DNA as a chip-building material is that it is not a good conductor of electrical current. To circumvent this, Dr. Woolley and his team is using “DNA as a scaffold” and then adding other materials to the assembly to create electronics. He is working on this with his colleagues, Robert C. Davis, Ph.D. and John N. Harb, Ph.D, at Brigham Young University. They are drawing upon their prior work on “DNA origami and DNA nanofabrication”.

Know When to Hold ‘Em

To create this new configuration of origami-ed DNA, they begin with a single long strand of it, which is comparable to a “shoelace” insofar as it is “flexible and floppy”. Then they mix this with shorter stand of DNA called “staples” which, in turn, “use base pairing” to gather and cross-link numerous other “specific segments of the long strand” to build an intended shape.

Dr. Woolley’s team is not satisfied with just replicating “two-dimensional circuits”, but rather, 3D circuitry because it can hold many more electronic components. An undergraduate who works with Dr. Woolley named Kenneth Lee, has already build such a “3-D, tube-shaped DNA origami structure”. He has been further experimenting with adding more components including “nano-sized gold particles”. He is planning to add still more nano-items to his creations with the objective of “forming a semiconductor”.

The entire team’s lead objective is to “place such tubes, and other DNA origami structures, at particular sites on the substrate”. As well, they are seeking us use gold nanoparticles to create circuits. The DNA is thus being used as “girders” to create integrated circuits.

What is the optimal range and variety in design, processing power and software that can elevate DNA chips to their highest uses? Are there only very specific applications or can they be more broadly used in commercial computing, telecom, science, and other fields?

Can any of the advances currently being made and widely followed in the media using the CRISPR gene editing technology somehow be applied here to make more economical, extensible and/or specialized DNA chips?

Does DNA computing represent enough of a potential market to attract additional researchers, startups, venture capital and academic training to be considered a sustainable technology growth sector?

Because of the potentially lower startup and investment costs, does DNA chip development lend itself to smaller scale crowd-funded support such Kickstarter campaigns? Might this field also benefit if it was treated more as an open source movement?

February 19, 2017 Update: On February 15, 2017, on the NOVA science show on PBS in the US, there was an absolutely fascinating documentary shown entitled The Origami Revolution. (The link is to the full 53-minute broadcast.) It covered many of the today’s revolutionary applications of origami in science, mathematics, design, architecture and biology. It was both highly informative and visually stunning. I highly recommend clicking through to learn about how some very smart people are doing incredibly imaginative and practical work in modern applications of this ancient art.

Here is the link to the podcast entitled How Instagram Took Over the World. I highly recommend listening to it in its entirety. There is much to learned from the very insightful Mr. Krieger about the constantly changing world of startups. My admiration and gratitude to both him and Mr. Thompson for such a lively and engaging presentation.

Here is a brief summary of the subjects covered in the order they were discussed:

Instagram originally began as an app called “Burbn”. It was not being used much at the time, but its photo-posting feature immediately drew the most interest of its initial users. The knowledge gained from the experience with Burbn became the foundation upon which Instagram was later built.¹

The co-founders’ key concerns all along have been ease-of-use in getting photos uploaded as quickly as possible and making them look good with the available filters and features.

When Instagram first launched, it very quickly gained an international audience. It generated early excitement because there were no language barriers in following other users. One of the initial and inspiring experiences of early users was following and supporting the rescue efforts after the 2011 tsunami in Japan.

At first, the co-founders were completely focused upon building the app’s infrastructure.

The media initially perceived the app as “something for hipsters”. In fact, a wide diversity of users was genuinely connecting with each other.

The co-founders needed to become well versed in copyright matters, as the users, not Instagram, own their photos. This included the provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Facebook purchased Instagram for approximately $1 billion in 2012. ² While FB’s philosophy is generally to get new projects implemented quickly online, Instagram prefers to take more time with their new upgrades and features to make certain they are done right.

Instagram has always been a “cohesive experience for users”.

Instagram has “changed the world” insofar as people “have a desire to tell stories”, and the app and others like it are “immediate and visceral”. Essentially, it enables users to “bring others into the moment”.

The ease-of-use of the app in getting photos uploaded quickly also permits users to “get back into your life” rather than taking too much time with the technology. In effect, taking more time to directly view and experience what a user has photographed after the photos have been easily uploaded and the phone put aside.

Both of Instagram’s founders, Michael Krieger and Kevin Systrom, have always gotten along well during the 6-year history of their company. Their respective skills in business and technology have always complemented each other.

The founders have always maintained two guiding principles in their work:

Do the simple things first.

In terms of craft and design, do fewer things better.

The biggest challenge for startups today is getting noticed as marketing and distribution have become more difficult.

2. The Wall Street Journal’s coverage, as just one representative news media source among, appeared in an article published on April 10, 2012, entitled Insta-Rich: $1 Billion for Instagram, by Shayndi Raice and Spencer E. Ante.

Today’s marketing and business development professionals use a wide array of big data collection and analytical tools to create and refine sophisticated profiles of market segments and their customer bases. These are deployed in order to systematically and scientifically target and sell their goods and services in steadily changing marketplaces.

These processes can include, among a multitude of other vast data sets and methodologies, demographics, web user metrics and econometrics. Businesses are always looking for a data-driven edge in highly competitive sectors and such profiling, when done correctly, can be very helpful in detecting and interpreting market trends, and consistently keeping ahead of their rivals. (The Subway Fold category of Big Data and Analytics now contains 50 posts about a variety of trends and applications in this field.)

I will briefly to this add my own long-term yet totally unscientific study of office-mess-ographics. Here I have been looking for any correlation between the relative states of organization – – or entropy – – in people’s offices and their work’s quality and output. The results still remain inconclusive after years of study.

One of the most brilliant and accomplished people I have ever known had an office that resembled a cave deep in the earth with piles of paper resembling stalagmites all over it. Even more remarkably, he could reach into any one of those piles and pull out exactly the documents he wanted. His work space was so chaotic that there was a long-standing joke that Jimmy Hoffa’s and Judge Crater’s long-lost remains would be found whenever ever he retired and his office was cleaned out.

Speaking of office-focused analytics, an article posted on VentureBeat.com on March 5, 2016, entitled CMOs: ‘Technographics’ is the New Demographics, by Sean Zinsmeister, brought news of a most interesting new trend. I highly recommend reading this in its entirety. I will summarize and add some context to it, and then pose a few question-ographics of my own.

New Analytical Tool for B2B Marketers

Marketers are now using a new methodology call technography to analyze their customers’ “tech stack“, a term of art for the composition of their supporting systems and platforms. The objective of this approach is to deeply understand what this says about them as a company and, moreover, how can this be used in business-to-business (B2B) marketing campaigns. Thus applied, technography can identify “pain points” in products and alleviate them for current and prospective customers.

Using established consumer marketing methods, there is much to be learned and leveraged on how technology is being used by very granular segments of users bases. For example:

By virtue of this type of technographic data, retailers can target their ads in anticipation of “which customers are most likely to shop in store, online, or via mobile”.

Next, by transposing this form of well-established marketing approach next upon B2B commerce, the objective is to carefully examine the tech stacks of current and future customers in order to gain a marketing advantage. That is, to “inform” a business’s strategy and identify potential new roles and needs to be met. These corporate tech stacks can include systems for:

Technographics can provide unique and valuable insights into assessing, for example, whether a customer values scalability or ease-of-use more, and then act upon this.

As well, some of these technographic signals can be indicative of other factors not, per se, directly related to technology. This was the case at Eloqua, a financial technology concern. They noticed their marketing systems have predictive value in determining the company’s best prospects. Furthermore, they determined that companies running their software were inclined “to have a certain level of technological sophistication”, and were often large enough to have the capacity to purchase higher-end systems.

As business systems continually grow in their numbers and complexity, interpreting technographic nuances has also become more of a challenge. Hence, the application of artificial intelligence (AI) can be helpful in detecting additional useful patterns and trends. In a July 2011 TED Talk by Ted Slavin, directly on point here, entitled How Algorithms Shape Our World, he discussed how algorithms and machine learning are needed today to help make sense out of the massive and constantly growing amounts of data. (The Subway Fold category of Smart Systems contains 15 posts covering recent development and applications involving AI and machine learning.)

Technographic Resources and Use Cases

Currently, technographic signals are readily available from various data providers including:

They parse data using such factors as “web hosting, analytics, e-commerce, advertising, or content management platforms”. Another firm called Ghostery has a Chrome browser extension illuminating the technologies upon which any company’s website is built.

The next key considerations are to “define technographic profiles and determine next-best actions” for specific potential customers. For instance, an analytics company called Looker creates “highly targeted campaigns” aimed at businesses who use Amazon Web Services (AWS). The greater the number of marketers who undertake similar pursuits, the more they raise the value of their marketing programs.

Technographics can likewise be applied for competitive leverage in the following use cases:

Sales reps prospecting for new leads can be supported with more focused messages for potential new customers. These are shaped by understanding their particular motivations and business challenges.

Locating opportunities in new markets can be achieved by assessing the tech stacks of prospective customers. Such analytics can further be used for expanding business development and product development. An example is the online training platform by Mindflash. They detected a potential “demand for a Salesforce training program”. Once it became available, they employed technographic signals to pinpoint customers to whom they could present it.

Enterprise wide decision-making benefits can be achieved by adding “value in areas like cultural alignment”. Familiarity with such data for current employees and job seekers can aid businesses with understanding the “technology disposition” of their workers. Thereafter, its alignment with the “customers or partners” can be pursued. Furthermore, identifying areas where additional training might be needed can help to alleviate productivity issues resulting from “technology disconnects between employees”.

Many businesses are not yet using technographic signals to their full advantage. By increasing such initiatives, businesses can acquire a much deeper understanding of their inherent values. In turn, the resulting insights can have a significant effect on the experiences of their customers and, in turn, elevate their resulting levels of loyalty, retention and revenue, as well as the magnitude of deals done.

My Questions

Would professional service industries such as law, medicine and accounting, and the vendors selling within these industries, benefit from integrating technographics into their own business development and marketing efforts?

Could there be, now or in the future, an emerging role for dedicated technographics specialists, trainers and consultants? Alternatively, should these new analytics just be treated as another new tool to be learned and implemented by marketers in their existing roles?

If a company identifies some of their own employees who might benefit from additional training, how can they be incentivized to participate in it? Could gamification techniques also be applied in creating these training programs?

What, if any, privacy concerns might surface in using technographics on potential customer leads and/or a company’s own internal staff?

Back in the halcyon days of yore before the advent of smartphones and WiFi, there were payphones and phone booths all over of the streets in New York. Most have disappeared, but a few scattered survivors have still managed to hang on. An article entitled And Then There Were Four: Phone Booths Saved on Upper West Side Sidewalks, by Corey Kilgannon, posted on NYTimes.com on February 10, 2016, recounts the stories of some of the last lonely public phones.

Taking their place comes a highly innovative new program called LinkNYC (also @LinkNYC and #LinkNYC). This initiative has just begun to roll out across all five boroughs with a network of what will become thousands of WiFi kiosks providing free and way fast free web access and phone calling, plus a host of other online NYC support services. The kiosks occupy the same physical spaces as the previous payphones.

The first batch of them has started to appear along Third Avenue in Manhattan. I took the photos accompanying this post of one kiosk at the corner of 14th Street and Third Avenue. While standing there, I was able to connect to the web on my phone and try out some of the LinkNYC functions. My reaction: This is very cool beans!

LinkNYC also presents some potentially great new opportunities for marketers. The launch of the program and the companies getting into it on the ground floor were covered in a terrific new article on AdWeek.com on February 15, 2015 entitled What It Means for Consumers and Brands That New York Is Becoming a ‘Smart City’, by Janet Stilson. I recommend reading it in its entirety. I will summarize and annotate it to add some additional context, and pose some of my own ad-free questions.

LinkNYC Set to Proliferate Across NYC

Link.NYC WiFi Kiosk 2, Image by Alan Rothman

When completed, LinkNYC will give New York a highly advanced mobile network spanning the entire city. Moreover, it will help to transform it into a very well-wired “smart city“.¹ That is, an urban area comprehensively collecting, analyzing and optimizing vast quantities of data generated by a wide array of sensors and other technologies. It is a network and a host of network effects where a city learns about itself and leverages this knowledge for multiple benefits for it citizenry.²

According to Mike Gamaroff, the head of innovation in the New York office of Kinetic Active a global media and marketing firm, LinkNYC is primarily a “utility” for New Yorkers as well as “an advertising network”. Its throughput rates are at gigabit speeds thereby making it the fastest web access available when compared to large commercial ISP’s average rates of merely 20 to 30 megabits.

Nick Cardillicchio, a strategic account manager at Civiq Smartscapes, the designer and manufacturer of the LinkNYC kiosks, said that LinkNYC is the only place where consumers can access the Net at such speeds. For the AdWeek.com article, he took the writer, Janet Stilson, on a tour of the kiosks include the one at Third Avenue and 14th Street, where one of the first ones is in place. (Coincidentally, this is the same kiosk I photographed for this post.)

There are a total of 16 currently operational for the initial testing. The WiFi web access is accessible with 150 feet of the kiosk and can range up to 400 feet. Perhaps those New Yorkers actually living within this range will soon no longer need their commercial ISPs.

Link.NYC WiFi Kiosk 4, Image by Alan Rothman

The initial advertisers appearing in rotation on the large digital screen include Poland Spring (see the photo at the right), MillerCoors, Pager and Citibank. Eventually “smaller tablet screens” will be added to enable users to make free domestic voice or video calls. As well, they will present maps, local activities and emergency information in and about NYC. Users will also be able to charge up their mobile devices.

However, it is still too soon to assess and quantify the actual impact on such providers. According to David Krupp, CEO, North America, for Kinetic, neither Poland Spring nor MillerCoors has produced an adequate amount of data to yet analyze their respective LinkNYC ad campaigns. (Kinetic is involved in supporting marketing activities.)

Commercializing the Kiosks

The organization managing LinkNYC, the CityBridge consortium (consisting of Qualcomm, Intersection, and Civiq Smartscapes) , is not yet indicating when the new network will progress into a more “commercial stage”. However, once the network is fully implemented with the next few years, the number of kiosks might end up being somewhere between 75,000 and 10,000. That would make it the largest such network in the world.

CityBridge is also in charge of all the network’s advertising sales. These revenues will be split with the city. Under the 12-year contract now in place, this arrangement is predicted to produce $500M for NYC, with positive cash flow anticipated within 5 years. Brad Gleeson, the chief commercial officer at Civiq, said this project depends upon the degree to which LinkNYC is “embraced by Madison Avenue” and the time need for the network to reach “critical mass”.

Because of the breadth and complexity of this project, achieving this inflection point will be quite challenging according to David Etherington, the chief strategy officer at Intersection. He expressed his firm’s “dreams and aspirations” for LinkNYC, including providing advertisers with “greater strategic and creative flexibility”, offering such capabilities as:

Dayparting – dividing a day’s advertising into several segments dependent on a range of factors about the intended audience, and

Hypertargeting – delivering advertising to very highly defined segments of an audience

Barry Frey, the president and CEO of the Digital Place-based Advertising Association, was also along for the tour of the new kiosks on Third Avenue. He was “impressed” by the capability it will offer advertisers to “co-locate their signs and fund services to the public” for such services as free WiFi and long-distance calling.

Poland Spring is now running a 5-week campaign featuring a digital ad (as seen in the third photo above). It relies upon “the brand’s popularity in New York”.

Capturing and Interpreting the Network’s Data

Link.NYC WiFi Kiosk 1, Image by Alan Rothman

Thus far, LinkNYC has been “a little vague” about its methods for capturing the network’s data, but has said that it will maintain the privacy of all consumers’ information. One source has indicated that LinkNYC will collect, among other points “age, gender and behavioral data”. As well, the kiosks can track mobile devices within its variably 150 to 400 WiFi foot radius to ascertain the length of time a user stops by. Third-party data is also being added to “round out the information”.³

Some industry experts’ expectations of the value and applications of this data include:

Helma Larkin, the CEO of Posterscope, a New York based firm specializing in “out-of- home communications (OOH)“, believes that LinkNYC is an entirely “new out-of-home medium”. This is because the data it will generate “will enhance the media itself”. The LinkNYC initiative presents an opportunity to build this network “from the ground up”. It will also create an opportunity to develop data about its own audience.

David Krupp of Kinetic thinks that data that will be generated will be quite meaningful insofar as producing a “more hypertargeted connection to consumers”.

Other US and International Smart City Initiatives

Currently in the US, there is nothing else yet approaching the scale of LinkNYC. Nonetheless, Kansas City is now developing a “smaller advertiser-supported network of kiosks” with wireless support from Sprint. Other cities are also working on smart city projects. Civiq is now in discussions with about 20 of them.

Internationally, Rio de Janeiro is working on a smart city program in conjunction with the 2016 Olympics. This project is being supported by Renato Lucio de Castro, a consultant on smart city projects. (Here is a brief video of him describing this undertaking.)

A key challenge facing all smart city projects is finding officials in local governments who likewise have the enthusiasm for efforts like LinkNYC. Michael Lake, the CEO of Leading Cities, a firm that help cities with smart city projects, believes that programs such as LinkNYC will “continue to catch on” because of the additional security benefits they provide and the revenues they can generate.

My Questions

Should domestic and international smart cities to cooperate to share their resources, know-how and experience for each other’s mutual benefit? Might this in some small way help to promote urban growth and development on a more cooperative global scale?

Should LinkNYC also consider offering civic support services such as voter registration or transportation scheduling apps as well as charitable functions where pedestrians can donate to local causes?

February 19, 2017 Update: For the latest status report on LinkNYC nearly a year after this post was first uploaded, please see After Controversy, LinkNYC Finds Its Niche, by Gerald Schifman, on CrainsNewYork.com, dated February 15, 2017.

1. While Googling “smart cities” might nearly cause the Earth to shift off its axis with its resulting 70 million hits, I suggest reading a very informative and timely feature from the December 11, 2015 edition of The Wall Street Journal entitled As World Crowds In, Cities Become Digital Laboratories, by Robert Lee Hotz.

2. Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia (W. W. Norton & Company, 2013), by Anthony M. Townsend, is a deep and wide book-length exploration of how big data and analytics are being deployed in large urban areas by local governments and independent citizens. I very highly recommend reading this fascinating exploration of the nearly limitless possibilities for smart cities.

These items just in from the Pop Culture Department: It would seem nearly impossible to film an entire movie thriller about a series of events centered around a public phone, but a movie called – – not so surprisingly – – Phone Booth managed to do this quite effectively in 2002. It stared Colin Farrell, Kiefer Sutherland and Forest Whitaker. Imho, it is still worth seeing.

Furthermore, speaking of Kiefer Sutherland, Fox announced on January 15, 2016 that it will be making 24: Legacy, a complete reboot of the 24 franchise, this time without him playing Jack Bauer. Rather, they have cast Corey Hawkins in the lead role. Hawkins can now be seen doing an excellent job playing Heath on season 6 of The Walking Dead. Watch out Grimes Gang, here comes Negan!!